March 2015 - February 2018

Meta Citizen Science

Grant ID

56115

Project Leader(s)

Alexander Szalay,Daniel Darg

Grantee(s)

The Johns Hopkins University

Grant Amount

$1,114,609

Funding area

Natural Sciences

Department

Natural Sciences

As technology continues to advance and improve the lives of people across the world, it also brings with it new social, economic and scientific challenges. This project aims to help solve such Big Problems through the development of a novel, data-intensive web system that uses principles of free-market economics to generalize 'Citizen Science' projects in a manner that can ultimately transform how members of society support and proffer from scientific research. It is based on the premise that directing humans to respond to questions, puzzles and pattern-recognition tasks is an especially powerful form of data acquisition in an age increasingly confronted by conceptual problems associated with 'Big Data' and artificial intelligence. However, directing humans to perform such tasks requires their motivation, which takes problems of Big Data into the realm of social psychology and economics. This project aims to overcome these motivational issues by placing the participants as a social collective in control of the tasks to be undertaken and the veracity by which they get investigated. If successful, the project has potential to give rise to an immensely valuable database with applications anticipated in a wide number of fields including eHealth, biostatistics and, most notably, a transformative approach to the presentation and scrutiny of scientific ideas. Not only could this system increase global participation in - and understanding of - the generation of scientific knowledge, it can also be used to expose large numbers of people to ‘Big Questions’ and to explore abstract spaces that conventional methods are unable to efficiently explore. It also has potential to impact 'real' economic systems by educating people in the principles of free-market economics as well as to bring about a tradable currency whose value (unlike modern fiat/abstract currencies) is backed by something of readily identifiable value: direct access to 'information'.